What’s Wrong With Today’s Board MeetingsAs customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

It’s time.

Reinventing the board meeting may offer venture-backed startups a more efficient, productive way to direct and measure their search for a profitable business model.

Reinventing the board meeting may offer angel-funded startups – which because of geography or size of investment typically don’t have formal boards or directors – to attract experienced advice and investment outside of technology clusters (i.e. Silicon Valley, New York).

Here’s how.

Because We’ve Always Done It This WayThe combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. Yet boards of large companies exist to monitor efficient strategy and execution of a known business model. While startups eventually get into execution mode, their initial stages are devoted to a non-linear, chaotic search for a business model: finding product/market fit to identify a product or service people will buy in droves at a sustainable, profitable pace.

In the last few years, our understanding that startups are not smaller versions of large companies, made us recognize that startups need their own tools, different from those used in existing companies: Customer Development – the process to search for a Business Model, the Business Model Canvas – the scorecard to measure progress in the search, and Agile Engineering – the tools to physically construct the product.

Why Have a Board Meeting?From a VC’s point of view there are two reasons for board meetings.

1) It’s their fiduciary responsibility. Once a startup gets going, it has asymmetric information. Investors get board seats to assure themselves and their limited partners that they are duly informed about their investment.

2) Investors believe that their experience and guidance can maximize their return. Here it’s the board that has asymmetric knowledge. A veteran board can bring 50-100x more experience into a board meeting than a first time founder. (VC’s sit on 6 – 12 boards at a time. Assume an average tenure of 4 years per board. Assume two veteran VC’s per board. = 50-100x more experience.)

From a founder’s point of view there are three reasons for board meetings.

1) It’s an obligation that came with the check.

2) Founders who have a great board do recognize the uncanny pattern recognition skills that good VC’s bring.

What’s Wrong With a Board Meeting?The Wrong Metrics. Traditional startup board meetings spend an insane amount of wasted time using Fortune 100 company metrics like income statements, cash flow, balance sheet, waterfall charts. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance. Most board meetings never get past big company metrics to focus on the crucial startup numbers. That’s simply a failure of a startup board’s fiduciary responsibility.

The Wrong Discussions. The most important advice/guidance that should come from investors in a board meeting is about a startup’s search for a business model: What are the business model hypotheses? What are the most important hypotheses to test now? How are we progressing validating each hypothesis? What do those numbers/metrics look like? What are the iterations and Pivots – and why?

Not Real-time. Startup board meetings occur every 4-6 weeks. While that’s great when you showed up in your horse and buggy, the strategy-to-tactic-to implementation lag is painful at Internet speeds. And unless there’s rigor in the process, because there is no formal structure for follow up, tracking what happened as a result of meeting recommendations and action items gets lost in the daily demands of everyone’s work. (Of course great VC’s mix in coffees, phone calls, coaching and other non-board meeting interactions but it’s ad hoc and not always done.)

Wastes Founders Time. For the founders, “the get ready for the board meeting” drill is often a performance rather than a snapshot. Powerpoints, spreadsheets and rehearsals consume time for materials that are used once and discarded. There are no standards for what each side (board versus management) does. What is the entrepreneur supposed to be doing? What are the board members supposed to be contributing?

The Wrong Structure. If you read advice on how to run a board meeting you’ll get advice that would have felt comfortable to Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller.

In the age of the Internet why do we need to get together in one room on a fixed schedule? Why do we need to wait a month to six weeks to see progress? Why don’t we have standards for what metrics VC’s want to see from their early stage startup teams?

Angels In AmericaFor angel-funded startups, life is even tougher. Data from the Startup Genome project shows that startups that have helpful mentors, listen to customers, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth. If you’re in a technology cluster like Silicon Valley you may be able to attract ad hoc advice from experienced investors. But very little of it is formal, and almost none of it approaches the 50-100x experience level of professional investors.

As there’s no formal board, most of these angel/investors meetings are over coffees. And lacking a board meeting there’s no formal mechanism to get investor advice. Angel investments in mobile and web apps today are approaching the “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” strategy.

And for startups outside of technology clusters, there’s almost no chance of attracting Silicon Valley VC’s or angels. Geography is a barrier to investment.

So given all this, the million dollar question is: Why in the age of the Internet haven’t we adopted the tools we build/sell to solve these problems?

In the next post – Reinventing the Board Meeting.

Lessons Learned

Early stage board meetings are often clones of large company board meetings

Great post but you’ve missed a fundamental reason why VC’s want to sit on boards: it provides them relevant information that can impact their investment.

Investors make their money from buying a chunk of equity into the company; when they see someone succeeding, they want to get a bigger chunk of that value creation. The board meeting not only keeps them in the loop with the performance of the business, but it gives them access to information to ensure they don’t miss out on a future round if the founders choose to raise one.

This is a great post and of course I’m surely not alone in awaiting part 2 with bated breath! It strikes me though that your work with entrepreneurs is partly about giving us the tools to guide our boards to the optimal metrics. I have certainly experienced board demands for big company metrics and all the overhead that goes with that. But, I think we sometimes underestimate our ability to shape that part of the discussion.

Ah Steve, you came across an area I’m working on just at this moment! It’s very true that entrepreneurs don’t usually question it because it’s all they’ve known. I’m working on a startup to address just that. Really looking forward to your next post, and will send a link to the private beta in a few weeks. Thanks, was a great posting indeed!

You raise an interesting question: how can we use the tools we’re all developing to make the board meetings (and all the other formal corporate necessities) flow? I too am eager to see the follow-up post, because I’ve seen many attempts to use collaboration, project management, and meeting tools limp sadly along, and have to wonder if this is really a tools question. There’s no shortage of information out there on how to run a good meeting, so the next question becomes: How do we make holding these meetings engaging and addictive, even for those who don’t give a flip for all the best-practices advice? More timely meetings, with more accountability, more actual working together and less posing – wouldn’t that be lovely? Thanks for taking on this topic.

Totally agree with you Steve. It should be treated differently in different development period of a company especially the board meeting. Just like we may need different work process in each stage of a company growth.

As a witness to a continuing surge in VC startups in Japan, I strongly believe you have raised and addressed some serious points here. There should be a continuous checkpoint process thought the inception process of a startup by re-vetting, monitoring and updating the business model, scorecard metrics, and transparency.

As a co-contributor to the Business Model Generation book and strong user of the Canvas with the Customer Development process, these steps add valuable diligence in the Japanese market.

[…] would not push even my own clients. It is getting better today. Steve Blank recently wrote about Why Board Meetings Suck and the important follow up Reinventing the Board Meeting. This has inspired even the Internet […]

I have had the great pleasure to work with Ram Charan in the 1990s to create a model for effective board meetings and for effective board-management team interaction for start-ups. All who have served with me, either as a board member, or management team member, have taken our model to implement elsewhere.

Steve, I’m so glad that I came across your article. It was great — it really resonated with me, a Silicon Valley attorney who has advised a number of startups. I plan to share your article with clients. Thank you!

[…] to any company that has an active board. In particular, it’s worth reading the whole of Why Board Meetings Suck. “Startup board meetings occur every 4-6 weeks. While that’s great when you showed up in […]

[…] to any company that has an active board. In particular, it’s worth reading the whole of Why Board Meetings Suck. “Startup board meetings occur every 4-6 weeks. While that’s great when you showed up in […]